Club Review: Mosaic at Printworks

"It was a measured procession of electro and techno blinders, rarely ceding momentum but never exhaustive"

My first trip to Printworks’s Autumn series was driven by one primary urge; I’d never seen Maceo Plex, one of the true mixing legends, DJ before. On the Saturday where the heatwave emphatically ended and London endured a temporary monsoon I found oxymoronic respite in the old printing halls’ gothic ambience, its swallowing space.

My last visit in May there was some issues with the soundsystem, difficulties in parsing the sonic boom of the speakers, but there was no such problem for the Mosaic party. Early doors with most people having not yet arrived, Silent Servant established the tone aptly with an animated set of techno, electro, and very little else. What else do you need? It was rambunctious, insouciantly mixing deep cuts with canon like Robert Hood’s ‘Solid Thought’.

Ellen Allien’s two hours was one of the best DJ sets I’ve seen this year, a miasmic rollercoaster inculcated in urgent decadence, wallowing in the squawking twin-beat off Thomas Schumacher’s ‘Ficken #3’ and spiralling with the arpeggiating synth strings on the Blind Observatory remix of Avion’s ‘Centum’, an utterly remorseless trip. Len Faki maintained the mood, accentuating the intense dirge with stompers like P.E.A.R.L.’s ‘Sorrows’, his reputation as an unpretentious and hypercompetent selector vindicated.

When the man himself Maceo Plex arrived it was with a bang, deploying a euphoric edit of Maetrik – his harder techno alter ego – anthem ‘Ninex 7-C’, as well as Anthony Rother’s populist classic ‘Back Home’. There were wafts of hidden delights for the Heads, including the rasping synthline from Ross From Friends’s ‘Thank God I’m A Lizard’ drifting like vapourwave in the background of a denser kickdrum track, an affectionate nod to one of London's most exciting producers at the moment. It was a measured procession of electro and techno blinders, rarely ceding momentum but never exhaustive. Years of seeking out this guy and the lad absolutely justified the wait.